Akumal Mexico thrives on eco tourism but because this tourism is unregulated it threatens the very
ecosystems that draw tourists and in first place namely the coral reefs and seagrass
Meadows there that support an incredible diversity of wildlife including invasive
species and shockingly charismatic megafauna like this adorable character I teach field
courses here to show University students what it's like to be a marine biologist by helping
them conduct their own scientific research projects focused on how ecosystems respond
to human driven change and after three weeks in the field I want to give my students the chance
to share their thoughts on what it's like to conduct field research for the first time
intense. busy. complicated. hard. challenging. I was just going to say
the same thing. exhausting. tiring. its interesting but its hard. tedious. tedious in a
way but in a good way. adventurous unpredictable. unpredictable. fickle. variable, you never know whats going to happen
late. late nights.windy. hot. sweaty. Id say fun.
fun. its fun. challenging but rewarding. rewarding. inspiring. worthwhile. its exciting. exciting. exciting.
what would you say is the biggest challenge?
probably controlling for bias. It was adapting your methodology as soon as, you
spend we spent five months designing our methodology, got here, changed most of it.
there were a lot of bumps in the road. it was hard because there
was different ways to like think about experiment yet consider this, consider the times, the weather,
when you're actually out there it can get repetitive
getting everyone on the same page organizing time getting the sites
like finding the right sites and like being kind of like put on a time crunch we had like go out
in the morning and afternoon and like that is so tiring and we're out there for three
hours four hours at a time that kinda killed me by the end
you never really get what you
expect like you kind of like expected like to be a certain way and then when you actually get onto
the field and you might have to like change stuff you don't know what you're going to come up with
at the end.so you're collecting data and then at the end is where you find out like Okay
let figure out what this means
how we're going to construct like our graphs like what do we want to compare what is it we
want to show like the audience. what do you think is the most surprising part about actually doing
this stuff versus just kind of reading about it.
the amount of writing was like from a start, was surprising to me.
I think I underestimated how long it would take to do everything.
I was surprised by how quickly you can get into the routine. like once you get into all the
research you kind of get out there and like figure out what you're doing it was just like
you just kind of go, so its cool to see how we would get like maybe like four samples the in first day
and then someday we're getting like 13 each time we went out by the last one so its kind of
of surprising I feel just like has such a big change over the few days just because we were so focus on what we were doing
probably was most surprised by like how many more connections there are than you expect
like maybe you set out and then you have one question in mind and therefore you want to
just focus on that one data point but then you know you realize you need everything
else regarding the environment and then you make even more connections
what would you say has been your favorite part about doing field research out here. finding
significance. significant results after running stats tests is a super exciting. finding out
that our p-values are significant and that we, like we our research
was meaningful in some way
the reef is super cool and like to getting to see all these organisms and like looking at their
natural behavior here has been pretty cool.
anytime you go out you find something brand new. you see different behavior you see
different fish you everything everything is new every single time.
I just love being in the field. I love being on boats. I love seeing, its a whole other world down there.
Its just gorgeous. and whats not to love about being on the ocean
this is like my first time so like coming into the course I didn't
even know like what a transect was I didn't
even know like a lot of what a lot of things were and so like until like doing this I know a lot more
about it. seeing all the stuff that we kind of already researched and read about to kind of
like come to life. well its one thing to be reading about
like the topics that you're interested in. but then actually going out
and doing the work and like doing it yourself and really
seeing everything it just is really awesome this feels like a job but a really really cool job